Windows 7, getting RC...

The release candidate of Windows 7 was released to TechNet & MSDN subscribers today (everyone else will have to wait until 5th May) so I downloaded it and again tried it on my Toshiba NB110 netbook . Just as I did previously with the beta version I installed from USB and it went even smoother than before with no problems reported in Device Manager.

Am going to try and use this release of Win7 a bit more than I did the beta version and will report back anything noteworthy.

Passed…

Finally got my ITIL v3 Foundation result through the post.  Even before opening it I had a feeling I’d passed as it was an A4-sized envelope marked ‘Do Not Bend’ which sort of indicated that there was a certificate inside.  Lo and behold there was indeed a certificate inside as well as another sheet of paper with my actual score.  I ended up getting 90%, which equates to getting 36 out of the 40 questions correct (and saying 90% sounds better!).  A little disappointed that I didn’t get 100% but given that the pass-mark is 60% I don’t suppose I did too badly.   My colleague from the Service Desk also passed which means that everyone who’s taken the exam at work so far has passed first time (although everyone else has done the slightly easier v2 exam).  Guess it’s just increasing the pressure for anyone else who’s going to take it…

Also, I’m going to be trying out Live Writer for updating my blog.  Seems pretty good so far, and who knows it might even make my postings more interesting….

The Winds of Change...

...aren't so much breezing through at work this week, it's more like a shamal. As I posted previously we're starting to implement ITIL v2 here, and earlier this week the official proposals were announced...

PowerShell in 15 minutes

If you've got 15 minutes to spare and want an overview of PS v2, brought to you by Jeffrey Snover, then check this out. This was a presentation he did at Lang.NET 2009, and if you can keep up it's well worth a look. You want end up knowing PS as a result but you'll have a pretty good idea about how powerful it is.

Preventing boredom with numbers (and PowerShell) #2

Towards the end of last week I started to look at how I could get a PowerShell script to generate a list a list of Perfect Numbers. It's not that I wanted to know what they are (that's what Google is there for), I just wanted to see if I could code it up in PS. Given the nature of Perfect Numbers, the first thing is to identify those numbers that are proper positive divisors of the starting number eg: 6 is the first Perfect Number as the sum of the proper positive divisors (1, 2, & 3) equal the starting number.

The basic premise was to code the division (easy), then check to see if the result was a whole number, cast all the results into an array and then see if the sum of the numbers in the array equalled the starting number, then start the process again incrementing the starting number by one.

First hiccup was to how to check whether the result of the division was a whole number. A post to the Scripting Guys Forum on TechNet on Saturday night prompted a number of suggestions as to how I could do this (thanks to all who replied!). Being lazy I've gone for the (hopefully!) least typing option and that is to perform a check on the result of the division with something like this:

$result = 6/2

if ($result -is [int]){write-host "It's a whole number"}

That's as far as I've got in what is probably the next installment of my series of 'Preventing boredom with numbers (and PowerShell)' postings, but fear not dear avid reader, I will keep you updated as to how my latest sleep-inducing PS project is progressing...

What's the temperature Mr Cricket...?

I was listening to the latest George Lamb podcast while I was running earlier and heard something that really needed an independent web-search to validate what I'd heard, namely that by counting the number of times a cricket chirps in 14 seconds and then adding 40 you'll know the current temperature in Fahrenheit. Sounded a bit dubious, but I subsequently found this on the Library of Congress website. The article actually says it's 15 seconds then add 37, but given that it's a pretty cool fact I'm not going to argue. There's some other interesting stuff to be found there, and I now know that I won't be able to have a zebra for a pet as they can't be domesticated. Oh well, back to the original plan of getting a monkey butler....

ITIL'd out of my mind...

I've just finished 3 days of ITIL training with the added bonus of having to sit the v3 Foundation exam this afternoon. Just have to wait for anything up to three weeks for the result to drop through my letterbox. We're starting to implement v2 at work, but even having only done the Foundation course, the amount of work that's going to be required is massive. That said, the potential gains in efficiency, effectiveness, and (warning, I'm about to slip into ITIL-mode) the improvement in our ability to deliver the right services to our users is going to be well worth it.

The best thing about handing my paper to the invigilator at the end of the exam? It signalled the start of just over a week off work...